Study 01 (2015)

Study 01 is an interactive narrative, a first approach at building an internally and conceptually coherent interactive narrative world and an exploration of the clash of formal and vulgar languages. The story takes the user through the journey of a man who seeks to begin a homosexual revolution based on highly sexualised interpretations of anarchist ideals.

This self-initiated project was the first of an on-going series of projects that I name studies. They serve as a way of investigating matters through active interaction, not just passive content absorption.

As the first full-blown and finished study I made, it offered a rewarding process of trial and error unfettered by any specific goal, only the interest in learning more about anarchism and in the imagining of a radical gay utopia.

The writing process was copying, pasting and editorialising two main sources: anarchist texts and gay sex ads/profiles. Both sources are hugely radical and explicit, both passionate about their subject and deeply poetic in their earnestness.

The programming was a constant effort in simplification and removal of anything that was not strictly necessary. After building most of the project with React, I decided to trash the whole program and rewrote it using only vanilla Javascript. CSS is also kept at a very minimal level, with only small interventions to improve readability.